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task automation

The goal of automation is not to eliminate or replace human labor, but to increase productivity and quality beyond what is possible with your existing team, so as to realize economies of scale and predictable quality levels. With automation, your team is able to manage more endpoints, because automation eliminates routine and mundane responsibilities or efforts, giving your technicians the time to focus on higher priority and more complex tasks. In addition, as a managed service provider (MSP), you receive a fixed fee for your services. As a result, you need to provide service in the most efficient way possible while delivering the highest levels of consistency and quality. Building automation into your IT services business will enable you to do so. In this eBook, you’ll learn tips and best practices to successfully incorporate automation into your IT services business, including:

Intent-based networking is the difference between a network that needs continuous attention and one that simply understands what your organization needs and makes it happen. It’s the difference between doing thousands of tasks manually and having an automated system that helps you focus on business goals. Cisco® Digital Network Architecture (Cisco DNA™) is your team’s bridge to an intentbased network. It is an open, extensible, software-driven architecture that accelerates and simplifies your enterprise network operations, while lowering costs and reducing your risk. Only Cisco provides a single network fabric that is powered by deep intelligence and integrated security to deliver automation and assurance across your entire organization at scale. Cisco DNA gives IT time back from time-consuming, repetitive network configuration tasks so you can focus on the innovation your business needs. Cisco DNA automation and assurance are built on a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller, ri

Intent-based networking is the difference between a network that needs continuous attention and one that simply understands what you need and makes it happen. It’s the difference between doing thousands of tasks manually and having an automated system that helps you focus on business goals.
Cisco DNA is the open, software-driven platform that turns vision into reality. Virtualization, automation, analytics, and cloud, all in one architecture.

As the shift into a digital economy continues to accelerate, companies must out-innovate, outthink, and outpace their competition. Businesses must embrace change and transform to become the disruptors in their industries rather than wait to be disrupted by their competitors.
In the face of this pressure to evolve, organizations need to transform IT to reduce both the capital and operational costs of legacy IT. They must offload repeatable and time-intensive manual tasks like backup, disaster recovery, and service deployment to software and policy-driven automation.

A company's products needed constant updates due to changing business rules and regulations, as well as new functionality. However, tasks such as regression testing took too long and consumed too many resources. Collaborative helped to dramatically speed up the process through automation and process analysis, leading to increased customer satisfaction.

RPA platforms represent a hyper growth market, with enterprises investing in new RPA platforms for process and task automation to achieve greater operating efficiency and agility, while allowing the human workforce to focus on more strategic and higher priority projects and tasks. Intelligent process automation (IPA) is in an early phase of its evolution and represents the next frontier for RPA vendors. This Ovum Decision Matrix (ODM) is a comprehensive evaluation to help enterprise IT and business leaders, including chief information officers (CIOs), enterprise and process architects, IT directors, line-of-business (LOB) leaders and process owners, and digital transformation leaders select an RPA platform that is well suited to their specific requirements.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has shown incredible promise across a wide range of industries. But the benefits of automation have mostly occurred through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which automates repetitive, mundane tasks – liberating workers to focus on higher-level business initiatives that only humans are capable of providing. After successful trials in most of the world’s largest organizations, automation and AI are poised to transform the global workplace. Making Work Human: 5 Challenges, research by Goldsmiths, University of London, supported by Automation Anywhere, seeks to uncover the main obstacles that organizations must now overcome in order to scale automation and AI, and recognize the true potential of these ground-breaking technologies.

System administrators and other IT practitioners spend as much as 50% of their time on routine, repetitive tasks. Does the following apply to your organization?
• You go from one server to the next, installing the same package on all of them. It works nine times out of 10, but the tenth time causes a failure ... and you can't identify what went wrong.
• You can't scale. When the business wants to move to the cloud, or asks for faster provisioning of development and test environments, you only have so many hours in the day — and you can't meet everyone's needs.
• You don't have time to get to the work that matters. You spend too much time on routine system management, and can't prepare for the projects that will bring real business value to your team — and customers.
With growing demands from all corners of your organization, you simply can't keep doing it all manually. Download this paper to learn how you can benefit from automation, and how IT infrastructure can become a strategic ass

Challenge
It is not uncommon for SAP system copies, including any post-editing, to take several days to complete. Meanwhile, testing, development and training activities come to a standstill, and the large number of manual tasks in the entire process ties up highly skilled SAP BASIS staff.
Opportunity
Enterprises are looking to automation as a way to accelerate SAP system copies and free up staff. However, this is only one part of the problem: What further complicates the system copy process is the need to safeguard sensitive data and manage huge data volumes while also ensuring that the data used in non-production systems adequately reflects the data in production systems so the quality of development, testing and training activities is not compromised.
Benefits
This white paper explains how a considerable portion of the SAP system copy process can be automated using the CA Automic Automated System Copy for SAP solution and SNP T-Bone, helping enterprises become more agile.

The enormous volume, velocity and variety of data flooding the enterprise, along with the push for analytics and business intelligence, is creating a massive challenge that is overwhelming traditional storage approaches. As the demand for capacity continues to escalate, companies must be able to effectively and dynamically manage the storage supply, but also the demand for storage resources. The key is to optimize the infrastructure through standardization and virtualization, and replace manual tasks with policy-based automation.

i. How automation and integration can work together to unify people, process, and technology. The security community has begun to embrace automation as a solution to handling tedious, repetitive tasks, allowing skilled staff to focus on more strategic and advanced endeavors. As destructive threats continue to increase, automation balances machine-based analysis with human-based domain knowledge to help organizations achieve optimal workflows in the face of staff shortages and alert fatigue. This SANS survey explores some of the misconceptions and facts around automation and how it can become a natural extension of individuals and teams trying to do their day jobs more effectively.

When your business doesn’t provide adequate digital collaboration tools, your employees are likely to use their own – potentially compromising security. Read this informative whitepaper for three ways to improve employee collaboration while ensuring compliance with security policies:
Why a consolidated approach to file sharing can boost security and productivity
How business-wide adoption of enterprise-level tools aids workplace mobility
What time-consuming tasks can be automated to improve efficiency and security

Featuring an expert from Enterprise Management Associates, this webcast discusses some tactical steps towards automation of various IT processes, showing how even in processes with interdependent tasks, IT Process Automation can start IT groups down the path of reducing complexity and error rates, two of the leading drivers of cost and chaos.

According to the report, Benchmarking the Accounting Function 2015, only 56% of companies currently use automation to reconcile accounts. While many finance leaders want to change the process of reconciliation, the task can seem overwhelming.
However, developing a plan does not have to be complicated or time-consuming – and the benefits far outweigh the risks. A smooth, stress-free financial close adds qualitative value to the company by freeing employees to focus on strategic initiatives and ways to grow business.
A CFO’s Guide to Transforming the Financial Close shares how to build a center of excellence to streamline reconciliation so you can align objectives to overall business goals. Leading-edge automation tools can stop the madness of shuffling papers, sorting emails and searching spreadsheets, turning the reconciliation process from a cost center to a value-add for the company.

BMC Service Automation automates repetitive, manual tasks (such as provisioning, patching and compliance) to reduce the margin for error, allowing IT to get things done more quickly, and across organizational silos. Software Consultant Ron Coleman provides a demonstration and discusses the key points of Service Automation from BMC Software.

Is your IT Automation strategy saving you money or just becoming more complex and costly? With the right unified strategy, IT Automation can pay for itself and deliver far more business value.
Watch this on-demand webinar, “New Strategies to Manage IT Automation Complexity” and learn how to:
• Reduce costs by integrating automatio
n for servers, middleware, networks and databases
• Eliminate manual and tedious IT Operations tasks with both new and existing technology
• Save time and money by consolidating configuration management processes across your IT infrastructure
• Transform compliance, audit that and remediation from a stressful event to a standard practice
Become part of the Automation revival is serving as a catalyst for IT Operations. Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how to integrate your IT automation strategy.

Give it a task, and it does it flawlessly. It even responds to events without staff having to intervene. When automation is part of a network’s design, the entire business flourishes. Here’s how it all happens.

Digital transformation will fail without a commitment to automation - what AHEAD
refers to as Relentless Automation. With the advent of public cloud and all of
its promise, along with the ripple effect from the DevOps mantra of “automate
everywhere”, technology teams must spin up new infrastructure, maintain
configurations, and set up and tear down environments much faster than ever before.
Of course, no one should automate for the sake of automating, or to simply be ahead of the curve. But while not every
activity warrants automation - whether due to the complexity and nuance of the task, or its infrequent occurrence - Relentless
Automation means identifying those tasks and processes where the benefits of automation outweigh both its upfront and
recurring costs.
Thankfully, the business benefits of standardizing and automating IT work are easy to spot:
> Freeing up staff for higher value work
> Reduction in errors and process variability
> More auditability and accountability, helping

Humans excel at tasks that require creativity, the opportunity to respond to the unexpected, and general attentiveness to the surrounding environment. Technology and machines, on the other hand, are built to process a lot of information quickly without getting bored; technology reliably completes the task it is assigned without deviation. The most powerful approach to adding technology to a team takes the strengths of both humans and technology into account and from that, creates a superior, collaborative system. For example, reporting software such as Spreadsheet Server and Atlas for Dynamics AX/365 by Global Software, Inc. both serve as machine learning intelligence that uses automation to reduce errors, while at the same time preserving humans’ ability to create reports and outcomes from the data the way they need to see it.

Project portfolio management (PPM) software suites have evolved significantly in just the last few years.
No longer simply straightforward task–consolidation tools, they have become powerful enterprise
solutions capable of everything from investment planning and management to collaboration and
workflow automation across concurrent initiatives.

Robotic process automation describes the use of technology to automate tasks that are traditionally
done by a human being. The technology itself mimics an end user by simulating user actions such as
navigating within an application or entering data into forms according to a set of rules. RPA is often
used to automate routine administrative tasks that typically require a human being to interact with
multiple systems, but RPA technology is evolving to support the automation of increasingly
sophisticated processes at scale within enterprise architectures rather than on the desktop. Over the
past two years, RPA has been adopted by a number of business process outsourcing (BPO) providers
and a growing number of end-user organizations are now deploying the technology themselves to
create “virtual workforces” of robotic workers.

Digital Elektronik bought four Epson robots for the job, and these robots completed the task in just a few months. Since then Digital Elektronik has used the robots for new applications, some similar but others quite different, demonstrating a key advantage of Epson robots in being flexible and reusable. Volker Spanier, head of factory automation at Epson Germany, says, “I think this is an excellent example of how Epson robots can improve production line efficiency and complete tasks that may not even be possible by hand. It’s also great to see our robots involved in the construction of such a memorable landmark that will stand the test of time.”

Organizations across all sizes and industries are leveraging tools to simplify business. Traditionally, marketing technology has been very task specific, designed to operate within a single functional silo such as email campaign management or lead scoring. But marketers know the value and significance of aligning marketing automation, sales force automation (SFA), and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in the cloud — a task that can be easily accomplished through the implementation of Marketing Technologies.

For years, executives have been automating for efficiency, freeing workers from repetitive
tasks, streamlining the back office and looking for cost savings. Now, they are exploring
intelligent automation to establish thinking processes—processes that communicate realtime insights to employees, customers and partners across an expanding ecosystem. The
ability to add intelligence to automation opens a new universe of possibilities that will have
a profound impact on the way organizations operate and the way work gets done. More than
anything else, intelligent automation will be a defining factor for the future workforce.

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